Firefox and the Chrome engine are open source projects. Anyone can modify the browser to enable ad-blocking in some form if a user is sufficiently determined.
Technically, sure. But, these are extremely complex software products, and it would be one hobbyist vs. an entire software division of a trillion dollar company who are determined to make sure you see ads.
Unfortunately, there are only 3 companies developing browsers right now: Google, Apple and Mozilla.
Apple’s browsers are only available on Apple platforms. In fact, if you’re on iOS you have no choice, you have to use Safari. Even browsers labelled as “Chrome” or “Firefox” are actually Safari under the hood on iOS. But, on any non Apple platform, you can’t use Safari.
Google is an ad company, so they don’t want to allow ad blockers on their browser. So, it’s a matter of time before every kind of ad blocking is disabled for Chrome users.
Firefox is almost entirely funded by Google, so there’s a limit as to what they can do without the funding getting cut off. They seem to be trying to find a way forward without Google, but the result, if anything is as bad as Google if not worse:
“investing in privacy-respecting advertising to grow new revenue in the near term; developing trustworthy, open source AI to ensure technical and product relevance in the mid term;”
https://blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mozilla-leadership-growth-planning-updates/
All these other browser people like are basically reskinned versions of Chrome or Firefox. They have a handful of people working on them. To actually develop a modern browser you need a big team. A modern browser basically has to be an OS capable of running everything from a 3d game engine, to a word processor, to a full featured debugger.
It looks like it’s only a matter of time before there will be 0 browsers capable of blocking ads, because the only two companies that make multi-platform browsers depend on ads for their revenue, and both of them will have enormous expenses because they’re obsessed with stupid projects like AI.
We’ve got an intelligence apparatus that has every message every one of us has ever sent electronically, and probably microphone data from every Internet connected device we’ve ever been in earshot of
Hahaha, no. The idea that devices with microphones are always spying on you is absurd. It just doesn’t happen. It couldn’t happen due to how much power and bandwidth it would require. And if they were it would be the corporations spying, and not the government. As for emails and text messages, sure. The US may collect a lot of data, but they can’t process a lot of data. Look how many violent attacks there have been in the US, and how few have been prevented
They’re really bad at spotting anything before it happens. When attacks fail, it’s almost always because the attacker screwed up, not because the spies found out ahead of time. The Nazi who tried to drive a U-Haul into the White House wasn’t stopped by spies, he was stopped by a security barrier, even though he’d been planning the attack for 6 months.
But, there’s always a small chance that they’ll stumble on you if you’re plotting something.
Still i think that the US has the unique situation of having relatively well armed civilians
This is a double-edged sword. In other countries the government is really reluctant to have the military shoot protesters, because the protesters are civilians and, pretty much by definition, unarmed. If the police or military do shoot protesters, the undecided public is very likely to turn against the government for slaughtering innocent, unarmed civilians.
In the US, police are terrified of civilians, and are more than willing to shoot them. Civilians are fairly likely to be armed, so if the government claims that the civilians shot first, a lot of people will believe them.
Trump started claiming the election was fraudulent on November 4th. He spent a month and a half riling up his base, telling them the election was stolen. Eventually on December 19th he set a date for his rally on Jan 6th, setting a firm date and giving his supporters 18 days to prepare.
The US is big, and getting to DC is expensive and difficult, and it takes a long lead time to make something like that happen. It’s now just one month since Trump took power, and although his chaos started immediately, it took weeks for it to build up to something that people might be willing to travel to DC to protest.
These things take time.
Street protests are one of several necessary activities for a change movement
Yes, name any successful movement for political change that didn’t involve street protests.
✅ French revolution ✅ Suffragettes ✅ Indian independence ✅ The Boston Tea Party
And, I would imagine that it’s extremely rare to have big protests without first having some small protests. People need to know they’re not alone. It’s really hard to be one of the first people at a protest. But, the bigger they are, the easier it is for people to find out about, and to feel confident in attending.
Add to that that everyone knows that to be effective these protests have to take place in DC, but the US is huge and DC is relatively small (and very strange as a city / metro area) so it will be a while before you can have mass protests in DC. The logistics of just getting there are difficult and expensive. In many countries, the capital is the biggest city in the country: London, Paris, Berlin, Madrid, Tokyo, Bangkok, Seoul, Mexico City… And, in countries where the capital isn’t the biggest city, it’s at least normally a very big city, Beijing: 22M, New Delhi: 28M, Ankara: 5M, etc. The Washington DC metro area spans the District of Columbia plus parts of 4 states, but is still only the 6th biggest metro area in the US.
I imagine there will be huge protests in DC. It will just take a while for all the logistics to be worked out.
Sure, but it makes up for that by having an idiot proof design.
Keep in mind that at the time London wasn’t all that big a city.
Cahokia is estimated at between 12k and 40k people. That’s a decent sized city for sure, but around the same time, Baghdad had a population over 1 million. Uruk in modern-day Iraq had 40k people at 3000 BC, and Ur hit 100k by 2000 BC. Rome and Alexandria hit 1 million 2000 years ago.
I think Tenochtitlan was more impressive, not only because of the population (estimated at between 200k and 400k on the day Cortez arrived) but also because of how the city looked, basically a city built into the middle of a lake. I still love to look at Thomas Kole’s visualizations of the city
By the way, if you haven’t read Cahokia Jazz, you should. It’s a fun crime story, set in a world where Cahokia didn’t fall, and where the independent native people are waging political battles to keep their freedom as Europeans claim the rest of the continent.
It’s worth remembering that most of them were killed by disease, and that the diseases travelled faster than the colonists. Europe had had centuries of people living in filthy cities where all kinds of diseases were constantly breeding. The survivors carried those diseases but were immune to them. As soon as they met the native populations, the natives were exposed to countless deadly diseases that were completely new to them.
Now, sure, the colonists went and tried to slaughter as many natives as they could, but often they’d get to a new native settlement and find it was mostly empty because everybody had already either died or fled. Who knows, the natives might have been able to put up a fight against the colonists if they hadn’t been so devastated by the diseases. I’d bet that the colonists just took all the natives dying as another sign that their conquest was blessed by their god.
I don’t know how common this was elsewhere, but in feudal Japan it was common for powerful families without a son to adopt an adult son who could carry on their family name and titles.
Unfortunately, these days the billionaires seem to be fond of pumping out dozens of children with different women, so they’re not likely to need a son to carry on the family name.
Yeah, a single day with no spending would only hurt small businesses that are very cash poor and can’t afford any kind of interruption. A big company will just shrug it off.
Much better are targeted boycotts with no expiry date. For example, nobody should be buying any ULINE stuff ever again.
NYC is one of a number of world cities known by acronyms or nicknames:
There’s even a whole country that goes by its initials: UK.
So, stop thinking this is some American thing, it’s just a way that people shorten the names of common cities that have a few too many syllables to be convenient.
I wonder if that’s true. Sewing machines haven’t changed much since they started. Cooking hasn’t either. But, if you’re a computer-using Gen Xer, you can’t still be running Windows 95 or something. You’ve had to keep up with the current tech.
Now, you might be using Windows 11 the same way you used Windows 95, and missing out on some of the newer features. But, I think most people who knew how to debug a networking problem in Windows 95 still can figure out how to do it in the newest Windows releases.
It’s like driving. Yes, older drivers are worse drivers, their eyesight and hearing is worse, their reaction speed is slower, etc. But, cars have changed pretty considerably in the last 50 years, and most older drivers know how to use modern cars. They may not be as good at using some of the gadgets, like the GPS system, as younger people. But, they’ve adapted to keyless entry, push-button starts, push-button windows, backup cameras, traction control, and so-on.
Sure, there are some technicalities. But, the whole “rule of law” hardly matters in the US these days. Most likely the Trump junta would declare any general strike to be illegal. After all, it involved “antifa”, a known terrorist organization.
The general point is that the more that reasonable and measured dissent and protest are not allowed, the more pressure is going to build up, and eventually you’re going to get chaotic and violent riots.
In America, … the anti-union Taft–Hartley Act … outlawed actions taken by unionized workers in support of workers at other companies, effectively rendering both solidarity actions and the general strike itself illegal.
So, a general strike is illegal in the USA.
But, remember the history of unions. The Luddites were textile workers who were upset that the mill and factory owners were breaking the law and denying their rights. With the government ignoring their rights and the owners trampling over them, the Luddites prepared to fight:
The Luddites met at night on the moors surrounding industrial towns to practice military-like drills and manoeuvres.
Then they broke things:
They wrecked specific types of machinery that posed a threat to the particular industrial interests in each region
And they killed:
Four Luddites, led by a man named George Mellor, ambushed and assassinated mill owner William Horsfall of Ottiwells Mill in Marsden, West Yorkshire, at Crosland Moor in Huddersfield.
And the government killed them:
The harsh sentences of those found guilty, which included execution and penal transportation, quickly ended the movement.[5][35] Parliament made “machine breaking” (i.e. industrial sabotage) a capital crime with the Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812
The point is, trade unions were a compromise. Get rid of trade unions and what you get instead is mob violence against factory owners. People die.
“Meet our demands or we’re going to walk around outside holding signs instead of working.”
vs.
“Meet our demands or we’re kill you and destroy your equipment.”
If a general strike is illegal, then why stop at a strike? “In for a penny, in for a pound.”
Luckily I have my own “robots” fighting hard to stop me from seeing ads.
You’re dreaming if you think NATO minus the US would fight the US if the US invaded Canada. There would be some excuse made, or some technicality found.
As for becoming states, what’s much more likely is that the US would make Canada a territory like American Samoa: no electoral college votes, no senators, no congressional representatives, not even US citizenship.
I wonder if there’s a plan to evacuate the Canadian leadership to some where in the far north. It probably wouldn’t make any difference because of US air superiority. But, taking the 90% of the population that lives within a few hundred km of the border is pretty different from taking the entire country all the way to the pole. It could be that setting up a functional government in Grise Fiord would force the US to actually try to hold more than just the south.
A smarter move would be to be a government in exile from England or something. The monarchy is a bit of a joke these days, but I think an invasion of a country where King Charles is officially still the monarch would force him to do something. If he didn’t, he’d lose what little remains of his power. I don’t know if he could rally the commonwealth to fight a real war against the US, but sanctions and so on would probably be possible.
As for what would happen on the ground if Canada were actually occupied. Imagine the “Troubles” from when there was a dispute over Northern Ireland. Add to that that Canadians and Canadian accents are essentially indistinguishable from American accents. Then add that there’s no way that Canadians could be kept out of the US, because of the longest land border in the world. Next, consider that slightly less than half the US are Trump supporters, and Canadian “terrorists” would have many friends in the US. Also, look at how incredibly easy it is to get weapons in the US. Finally, think about how the US has had almost no war on its own soil since the civil war.
The US is used to sending soldiers to kill and die overseas. But, look at the destruction of Gaza, and compare that to Sept 11th. Two buildings fell and a few thousand people died and the US absolutely freaked out. Just imagine how unprepared the US would be for an actual guerrilla resistance on its own soil.
Terrorist / Terrorism seems to be a magic word in US law and policy.
If a country has organized crime in their country it’s no big deal. If there are close ties between the rulers and the criminals, that’s unfortunate.
But, if the criminals are now labelled as terrorists, then you get to go on the state sponsors of terrorism list, which comes with all kinds of sanctions and restrictions.
If you look at so-called “terrorist” organizations, there’s almost always elements of “terrorist” activities, but also evidence of other random criminal activities, and often legitimate political activities too. Take Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA. Some of their funding came from fuel and drug smuggling. So, where you draw the line between a “terrorist” group and a criminal group is pretty arbitrary. I think most people would say that the Mexican cartels are primarily criminals though. While they do kill people in ways that are intended to send a message, the message is generally “don’t mess with our profits” rather than some political ideal.
Every country has some corruption, definitely including the US. So, what happens if a Mexican politician was accepting bribes from Narcos and passing legislation favourable to them? When does that become the state sponsoring terrorism?
Putting the “terrorist” label on Mexican cartels seems like a prelude to doing things that violate Mexico’s sovereignty. If the cartels are merely violent criminal organizations, it’s a problem for Mexico’s government. If they’re “terrorists” then the US can lob missiles into Mexico, because it has a long-standing policy of violating the sovereignty of countries that “harbor” (i.e. contain) terrorists.